Oscilloscope Bootlegs Its Own Movie, Will Release It on Twitter’s Vine

"Citizen Kane" ran a shade under two hours and "The Godfather" ran a shade under three, but the "future of film" may be in seconds, not hours. Or so a tongue-in-cheek release issued Tuesday would have you believe.

Oscilloscope Laboratories will release its new movie “It’s a Disaster” on Vine, the Twitter-owned social video service. Vine enables people to take six-second videos of anything they want and upload them to share with the rest of the world.

So how does that work with a film? Oscilloscope bootlegged its own film with an iPhone and will upload it in six-second increments to the app. Vine users who want to check it out can then watch it in those fragments.

The app has been one of the most popular in the iTunes App Store since its Jan. 24 launch, though it has also been the butt of many jokes for a self-inflicted “porn problem.” Twitter responded by imposing an age limit.

The idea of releasing a film in six-second pieces is, to put it gently, novel, or as one Oscilloscope employee put it, “a joke.”

“We’re embracing the future!” Oscilloscope chief Dan Berger emailed.

Whether Oscilloscope’s tack with this movie is an experiment, a marketing ploy or an earnest attempt at reaching the attention deficit generation remains to be seen. Perhaps it’s all three.

The company’s official line, as elaborated in a press release by Bruce Farnsworth, Oscilloscope’s Minister of Informative Updates, is as follows:

“From the moment it launched just three short weeks ago, it was so clear to us that six-second loops of video, edited in-phone, and posted in real time was and will be the future of film distribution. While we still endeavor to release films via some other methods, we didn’t want to be left out in the cold and we are proud to be an early adopter of tomorrow, early.”

Take that with a grain of salt.

Todd Berger’s film, a doomsday comedy starring David Cross, Julia Stiles and America Ferrera, will debut on digital platforms and VOD March 5 and in theaters April 12.